Microstock: UGCX 2009

I wouldn't say I've abandoned microstock, but it has been pushed way to the backburner lately. I still have hopes of contributing a small number of images and making a little pocket change, but I'm ok if I make nothing on it. I also still have hopes of summarizing my earnings in a post here but have not gotten around to it (heck, I'll save you some trouble -- two Big Macs!).

When I first started reading about the UGCX (User Generated Content Conference & Expo) -- a conference which will including a lot of microstock authors and players -- on Microstock Diaries, I really wasn't all that interested in going. Then I realized it was only 15 miles away, the week after my PhD defense, and an Expo Hall pass was complimentary (including the keynote speeches)...

You can't beat free!

So I've registered (free expo passes are available until Jan 28th) and I'm hoping to get down there to check out a keynote speech or two and take a walk around the Expo floor. I'm not expecting much and I have no goals in going, but why not check it out?

Microstock: October Summary

I really like the fact that Lee Torrens at Microstock Diaries shares all his earnings information with the general public. It really puts a lot of things in perspective to see real numbers and real performance comparisons.

So, in the interest of full disclosure, here are my results for the first two months. I've essentially earned a meal at In 'n Out for maybe 30-40 hours of work (yes, folks, that's a big 10c an hour). Blogger doesn't do tables very well so it takes a little creativity to read it. The first column is the number of images in my gallery at the end of the given month and the earnings are specified per month (not cumulative).

Month		Dreamstime		Fotolia		Shutterstock
September	15	$0.00	11	$0.00	-	-
October	20	$2.70	15	$2.31	12	$0.00

Total Earned to Date: $5.01

I sold two images at Dreamstime and three at Fotolia.

I won't lie; I'm realizing Microstock isn't really a huge moneymaker and it takes a LOT of time and work to achieve anything. Like many things, it is a hard way to make an easy living, and I don't foresee anyone but the top 1% of microstock contributors making enough to make a real living.

I'm not abandoning it yet, but I am going to focus on shooting specifically for microstock to see if I can get more sales for less images. The main complication for that is I can't use my kids for models and I don't want to pay pro models, so that doesn't leave me with much.

As long as it stays a fun hobby, I'll keep going, at least until I can get my first payout.

For November, my goal is to finish getting my archives online (which I think will result in 10-20 more images at each site) along with maybe one or two microstock specific non-model shoots. My income will be tiny and inconsistent and I would be unsurprised if I earned absolutely nothing.

Microstock: Shutterstock Priorities

At Shutterstock, apparently new images have quite a boost in the search priorities which almost always results in immediate sales right after upload.

Of course, I haven't gotten any sales, since all my images have taken days to appear in the search index. Apparently I'm not the only one either according to this forum post.

While I don't mind too much if I don't get a bunch of sales right out of the gate, if the search system causes images to be buried soon after upload, that is a problem for me, especially if each sale only pays me 20 cents. I'm going to upload more this week to see if I can get the boost. If there's no boost or I don't make significant sales this week, I may stop uploading because it is not worth the time involved.

PS, my second batch of images took about 48 hours to be reviewed, which is in line with many other sites.

Microstock: Registered for Shutterstock

I've decided I shouldn't wait any longer for the review-based microstock sites like Shutterstock. After all, worst case I'd have to wait a month to resubmit.

So I submitted a bird-heavy batch of 10 photos to Shutterstock tonight. We'll see how it goes!

First impressions:

• Initial sign-up was easy.
  
• Shutterstock's website is a bit primitive.
• Shutterstock is very straightforward on their rules -- quite nice because many sites bury them.
  
• Getting 7 of 10 photos is a little daunting but shouldn't be a problem. It helps to have a list of accepted photos at Dreamstime and Fotolia and a bit of sales history.
  
• The submission system is pretty nice, although it forces you to keyword all images at the same time which is scary (what if I lose my connection!). Generally, though, it is easy to keyword and tag, and it even highlights possible misspellings for you.
• From what I have heard, Shutterstock's subscription program gives you a lot of sales whenever you have a decent number of new photos submitted. But, at only 25c a sale, I'll need a lot to make any money.
• Minimum payout is $75.

That's all for now. I'll keep you posted!

Tuesday Update (two days later): Nine of my ten images were accepted first thing Monday morning, but a second batch of eight images is still awaiting review over a day later, so I suspect Shutterstock puts priority on new signups. Also, my original images haven't been indexed into the search yet (although if I search for my name they show up), so apparently indexing takes days rather than hours like many sites.

Microstock: Look Ma, I Made the Cover of TIME Magazine!

Ok, so let's say you shoot your kids on a white background for microstock and upload images to a few different microstock sites. Suppose the image above is included in your submissions.

Then, a few months down the road, you see this TIME magazine on a rack:


Your son, with t-shirt digitally removed and a needle placed menacingly near him, is essentially on every news stand in the world!

And what you'd get paid?

$25...


Well, ok, I doubt it happened exactly like this. TIME knows how important appropriate permissions are, so I guarantee they contacted owner of the baby shot (Sergei Chumakov) and negotiated appropriate terms. TIME knows it has to dot all the "i"s and cross all the "t"s -- otherwise they'll be sued nearly instantly. In this case, the credit for the photo was:

PHOTO-ILLUSTRATION FOR TIME BY ARTHUR HOCHSTEIN WITH PHOTOS FROM PENNY GENTIEU/BABYSTOCK.COM, SERGEI CHUMAKOV AND ISTOCKPHOTO.

In fact, the iStock page doesn't have the extended license option, so I'm sure TIME approached Chumakov to provide suitable payment. What's a Time cover worth, anyway? (I'd guess at least a few thousand).

Although the Dreamstime version does have extended licenses available -- can you imagine how upset the photographer would be if TIME had (legally) increased the maximum copies and paid only $20-$30 for the primary source image for their cover?


This stuff has been on my mind lately because I'm currently trying to convince (or decide if I want to convince) my wife to let me use images of my kids for microstock. I still need to sit down with her and find out what her big concerns are so I can do the research and see if there are any protections against them. My kid making TIME wouldn't bother me that much but it would likely bother my wife a lot. (Attention TIME: a suitcase full of cash might smooth things over with her... If you like any images on this site, I'm sure we can come to an agreement for the full-size image, RAW file, or lock of hair!).

Anybody heard of any similar microstock horror stories (or microstock success stories)?


Anyway, thanks to Steve at Microstock Insider for the post that led to my discovery of this image.

Also, guess what I have to do today? Get my kids their flu shots!

Microstock: Fotolia, the Honeymoon is Over!

Of the latest batch of 11 images that I submitted to Fotolia, only 3 were accepted! Some rejections I understand or at least can deal with (Similar Photograph), most of them were the general umbrella term Technical Problems.

According to the e-mail, technical problems can be:

• Blurry or out of focus
  
• Over/Under exposure
  
• Framing problem
  
• Over or under saturated colors
  
• Problems with contrast
  
• Noise or Pixelation
  
• Quality of routing
  
• Interpolation problem

Really? You can't give me any more of a clue to which one?

In particular, the images in this post (click to see larger) are some of my favorites. I really like how the birds are engaged with the camera. The extreme depth of field is due to shooting nearly wide open from inside my parents' house outside to the bird feeder.

So now, I don't know if Fotolia (or that reviewer) just doesn't like extreme depth of field on wildlife shots or is concerned about noise (I shot at ISO 800 but did a pass of Noise Ninja in Bibble Pro), sharpness, loss of shadow detail, or some other random reason (quality of routing? what the heck is that?).

So I posted a message to the forums and anxiously await a reply. Hopefully someone in the know (i.e. a reviewer) can give me a real reason because other photographers speculating isn't quite good enough for me at this point. I'm also not against reducing the noise in each image a little more and resubmitting in the hopes that it was (a) a noise problem or (b) a cranky reviewer.

I'll get extra feedback once they get reviewed at Dreamstime, but that will probably be in a week (!).

If any of you experienced microstockers have an idea of why these images didn't meet technical standards (or why Fotolia reviewers are cranky) please leave a comment!

For now, consider yourself on notice, Fotolia. I can deal with rejections and even my current 45% acceptance rate. But if you complain about technical problems but don't tell me what they are so I can fix them or at least be aware of them... well, you're just wasting my time. And making me wait 48 hours to get the images reviewed was pretty uncool too -- the only reason I let Dreamstime get away with making me wait a week is because I love everything else about the site.

Microstock: Comments on Fotolia

This post has sat in my drafts long enough -- time to bang it out. Mostly, I'm just trying to outline my experiences with Fotolia and give a little bit of comparison with Dreamstime.

All my Fotolia related posts are here and my Dreamstime related posts are here.

The first big plus for Fotolia is speed of review. At Fotolia, review time is measured in hours, and at Dreamstime, it is measured in days (and honestly it feels like weeks). Typically Fotolia has my images reviewed within 8 business hours of when I submit them, although I submitted a batch this morning and they didn't get reviewed today (I expect them first thing tomorrow). BIG improvement!

One downside is the lack of an FTP upload... err, they have it, but I can't for the life of me figure out how to log in. And I'm a computer scientist! But, their flash uploader is very easy to use and fast, so no problem there.

Also, Fotolia initially rejected a few of my images (pretty much silently, actually). They require all images to be >= 4 MP unlike 3 MP at Dreamstime. Easily fixed by widening my crop slightly or in some cases just upsampling a little bit.

Keywording at Fotolia is a MUCH bigger hassle. For one thing, they accept multi-word keywords, which forced me to go back through all my images and re-keyword them (although I had to do it anyway because Bibble was lopping off parts of my longer lines). Along with that, it is just not a very convenient system, and once you submit an image for review, you can't change anything until it gets through review! Once you get used to the system it isn't as bad, but it still takes longer to finalize submissions.

The increased speed of review is a huge win though, since it really lets you keep a feeling of momentum. A day to wait isn't too bad... a week is horrendous.

Finally, there's lots of rumors flying around the web that Fotolia is overly picky compared to the other sites, and I've seen a little bit of that. I've had a few images rejected at Fotolia which I thought were definitely acceptable (and even sold one at Dreamstime!) but overall, it hasn't been as bad as I thought it would be.

Finally, one benefit of Fotolia is you can cash out at any time (with a $1 fee if under $50) instead of needing to wait until $100 at Dreamstime. Although, I tried checking it out at Fotolia and it gave me an error that I had less than $50... So maybe that's not as much of a benefit as I thought it was.

Overall, I like Fotolia -- not sure if I'd say I like it better than Dreamstime, although my portfolio on Fotolia is outselling my Dreamstime portfolio at a 3:2 ratio. I've sold three images at Fotolia... I'll let you do the math!

Microstock: First Dreamstime Sale!

I had my first sale at Dreamstime earlier this week -- the Stanford dish image above. It was the medium sized version too, meaning I got $1.36 for it!

Realistically, I'm really not making much money at this microstock thing. Even though I only have fifteen images up, two sales in a month isn't going to buy me anything other than a burger.

But, I've got a few plans before I give up on microstock, the primary plan is to actually shoot some images for microstock, instead of grabbing images from my portfolio.

BTW, the image above was one of those rejected at Fotolia.

Microstock: First Sale!

I had my first microstock sale ever at Fotolia yesterday and it turns out to be the very first photo I uploaded to any microstock site!

Of course, I can't get too excited, because someone ordered the smallest possible size and I made a grand total of 33 cents. But it is something, at least :)

BTW, I've got about four posts in various stages of completion which I'll get up when I return to the States. My time in Nice has been a good vacation, although I haven't been focusing on photography too much (in other words -- don't expect any great pictures from it).

Also, today I'm hoping to visit a photography museum here in Nice. Hopefully it's nice! (har, har, har)

Microstock: More Rejections

I had a few more rejects from Dreamstime (12 of 16 images approved, 4 images pending) which are listed on this page. Also, of 19 submissions to Fotolia, 11 were approved, which is about what I expected. Dreamstime is more lenient than Fotolia, at least from what I've heard. I'll post more about my recent experiences with Fotolia in the future -- the tentative title is called 'Fun with Keywording the Second Time'...

The light-painted cash shot that opens the post isn't too much of a surprise; microstock hates underexposure, especially if certain items (like the coins) aren't recognizable. I should have known better on that one. Oddly enough, Fotolia approved the image. Other low key images haven't done well, including the Angry Blender (didn't bother submitting it to Fotolia) and Jeju Sunrise (FT rejected, DT pending). On all these images I actually spent a lot of time playing with the image to improve contrast -- I tried doing an HDR-type process on Jeju Sunrise but the sand had a lot of artifacts so I put that off and submitted the low-key version.

My two bee images took a hit too on both sites, although I went in to the process knowing the detail wasn't quite there in both images. The second image I went back and forth on submitting it because the composition just didn't seem right (and that nasty shadow on the bee's back) but went ahead and submitted it anyway.

Both images were rejected from DT for poor lighting/contrast/exposure and subject too common or two specific. The better of the images (the first) made it through at Fotolia though and the second was rejected for quality of the photograph.

Really surprising with the rejection of both fuchsia shots at Fotolia for overabundant photo category. While they have a ton of fuchsia shots, one one is on black and it seems significantly different from my shots. Personally, I was a bit surprised the shots were accepted at Dreamstime because I blew some highlights and couldn't get them back. Oh well...

Even more surprising was Fotolia's rejection of my Green Stairway shot from Jeju. They said that:

The photographs in the Fotolia database are intended for sale as illustration of brochures, magazines, websites, and presentations. Your photographic work is excellent but does not meet the needs of the Fotolia customer base.

Sorry, but I disagree on that one. It's a solid image that has more merit than many of my other shots that were accepted!

Finally, Fotolia rejected three shots which included the Stanford dish (I don't have them elsewhere on the site, but they are pretty good -- I'll see if I can add them to this post tonight). They cited quality of the photograph, but I really don't see that. Those images were technically pretty good and I feel like they maybe rejected for another reason. Oh well, I'll see how they do at Dreamstime in a few days.

This post might seem like a big complaint about my rejections, but it is anything but. In 75% of cases, I agree with the rejections (and I feel that some of my shots should have been rejected but weren't). More importantly, I'm putting this stuff up to give anyone new to microstock an idea of what is declined, refused, and rejected.

The rejections don't bother me that much. At this point, I'm getting more worried about the commercial nature of my portfolio in general and the economics of it all. But that's another post altogether...

Microstock: First Refusal

Dreamstime gave me my first refusal today for the Angry Blender image above, stating:

• We have reviewed your file and this is not quite what we're looking for.
• Lack of composition. Please visit the Stock Photo Utilities section of our site or the message boards for more information on how to produce stock-oriented images.
• Poor lighting setup, poor contrast or incorrect exposure.
  

I've looked over the image again, and I have to admit -- I agree.

There isn't enough contrast in the face to draw the eye to it. Granted, this is one of my favorite images, but I need to dodge the "face" of the blender a bit more. But... I'm not going to bother, because let's face it -- it wouldn't do that well in stock anyway. Honestly... who could need an angry blender for their layout?

While it is a bummer to get an image rejected, I'm pretty surprised it hadn't happened yet (nine of ten images have passed). I'll take a 90% acceptance rate anytime.

P.S. Currently, the approval wait at Dreamstime is 5-6 days along with 1-2 days of wait for indexing into search. This means a wait of about a week from submission to images getting views. Don't expect to make money fast, that's for sure!

Microstock: Current Update

There's a number of things I want to comment on related to microstock, so I'll just lump them all into one post.

Currently I've got three images approved at Dreamstime (still 100% acceptance!) with 13 more pending. I've also got four more in various stages of keywording and editing that should be submitted tomorrow at the latest. I even decided against submitting two (pretty nice, IMHO) shots of Alcatraz after I realized there were near-identical shots already in the Dreamstime system.

Overall, I'd say I dread keywording the most since images tend to stay in the pre-keyworded stage longer than any other stage (except maybe the "add more blue to the sky" stage -- see tutorial here!). Overall, I probably spend more time editing submissions than I need to -- the users of the images likely edit them some too. But, it is nice to know that I'm building a folder of quality, edited images (including IPTC tags) that I can submit where ever I want.

That said, I've got three images active at Dreamstime with a combined 35 views and no sales. I'm beginning to suspect that my typical subjects (birds, nature, travel, etc.) and style (dark backgrounds if I do isolation) probably will not sell that well in microstock. But, by the time I go to the conference in France in less than two weeks, I'd like to have fifty images submitted, and I'm bound to make some sales with that many images live.

I'm still going to wait a bit before applying to the bigger agencies (IStock and Shutterstock) because they need portfolios to review and I want to see which of my images sell well. But, I was looking through Arcurs's two minute agency overview and I noticed his second place earner is Fotolia, which doesn't require an application process to submit images. So I think my next submission location, starting in a few days, will be Fotolia.

Actually, I should mention, the general buzz on Fotolia is quite inconsistent. People tend to be polarized about the site, either making lots of sales or very few at all. There's also rumors of nasty, quasi-identity theft, drivers license submission requirements and a much reduced acceptance rate. At this point though, I'm just going to give them a shot. After I get 20 images uploaded to Dreamstime, I'll take that twenty and submit them to Fotolia and see what happens.

And guess what? The first person to leave a comment with a Fotolia referral link (or a web page with your referral links) will get my Fotolia referral!

Just my way of rewarding one of my readers!

(I'm also curious to see how long it will take before someone actually offers me a link -- if it takes more than a day or two, I'll just go with Yuri Arcurs's link, as much as the Yuri Arcurs Distribution Network weirds me out!)

Microstock: A Keywording How-to

Selling images in microstock requires getting past a number of obstacles:

1. You need to acquire an image (i.e. take the picture).
2. You need to post-process that image.
3. You need to upload, keyword, and classify the image.
   
4. You need to get the image approved by the microstock site.
5. You need to get people to see the image.
6. You need people to buy the image once they've seen it.
   

Of these obstacles, I'd say the biggest problem is just getting people to see the image (#5). If they don't see it, they can't buy it. #1 is important, but let's face it, if you can't do #1, you shouldn't be in microstock. But actually getting people to look at your image and consider it for purchase is what drives your profit.

The biggest bottleneck for getting past #5 (aside from which site you use -- I'm not getting into that right now) is keywording. Keywords are the ONLY WAY someone will ever look at your image instead of the other millions on the site. But, let's face it, keywords are probably one of the least fun parts of microstock.

You could, of course, pay for someone to keyword your images for you. Dreamstime, in fact, offers an option for someone to keyword each image for $0.40. There's other places on the net that will do it for $1 or more an image. If you know your images will sell, that's probably a good deal. And professional keywording likely has good value because they (should) know what will get your image seen. But, for a beginner, paying for keywording is silly because likely only a small percentage of your images will ever sell. So it is worth learning to keyword.

I'll explain how I manage workflow later, so for now, let me explain what I've been doing for keywording.


First, I'll take a look at my image and enumerate every possible word I can think of that directly hits the topic of my image. I usually avoid very general words (like animal, although it probably doesn't hurt to have it) and focus on obvious things. For instance, take my first submission (which needs to be re-keyworded anyway):

Snowy Egret in Autumn

First, I write out a title and description. I don't usually go all out on the descriptions -- as far as I can tell, they are not as important as keywords. In this case, the description is: A Snowy Egret (Egretta thula) wading in a stream in Autumn. (BTW, the picture was actually taken in December which probably isn't technically autumn season. But it looks like autumn, so...)

Next, I enumerate all the keywords I can think of including any words in my description. In this case, I can come up with:

snowy egret autumn bird egret egretta thula fall stream wading walking water white leaf leaves

Formatting doesn't matter much -- as far as I can tell the sites strip out formatting anyway. In particular, this means that 'snowy egret' is treated as two words. I also make sure to get the scientific name in case someone searches on it.

The fact of the matter is I might have missed some keywords.

I could sit around and ponder for a while to come up with more, but that would take a while.

Or, I could search at the microstock site for images that have sold well and look through their keywords for ideas. Of course, this requires a bunch of searches which make take some time. Or...

I could use Yuri Arcurs's PhotoKeywords.com! (And yes, I realize the real web address is not PhotoKeywords.com, but gets redirected there.) PhotoKeywords automates the search for you -- just put in some keywords, select images that are similar to yours, then select the keywords you want to use and it puts them in a handy list for you!

In this case, I searched with snowy egret and selected about 30 words, most of which I didn't have:

animal, aquatic, ardeidae, avian, beak, beauty, bill, bird, egret, egretta, feather, fisher, grace, heron, marsh, nature, neoaves, neognathae, neornithes, park, plumage, snowy, snowy-egret, swamp, thula, water, waterfowl, wetland, white, wilderness

Note that a lot of these I didn't think of, including general bird things (avian, beak, feather, etc), further classification terms (neoaves, neognathae, etc), and environmental things (wetland, wilderness, etc).

Now, I could carefully search through these words, format them, and get rid of duplicates. Or, I could just paste all my words into the Dreamstime interface and let it sort them for me! The final keyword list that results is:

animal aquatic ardeidae autumn avian beak beauty bill bird egret egretta fall feather fisher grace heron leaf leaves marsh nature neoaves neognathae neornithes park plumage snowy stream swamp thula wading walking water waterfowl wetland white wilderness

You can see this same keyword list on the Dreamstime page for my image (click the image above).


Ok, I hope that brief intro to an effective keywording scheme is helpful to you. Or if you are experienced and there are tricks you use that I haven't mentioned, please post in the comments! Keywording is something that you can get pretty good at quickly, but there is always room to improve.

Microstock: First Image Approved!

I logged in to Dreamstime this morning and found that my first image was approved!

1 for 1, baby!

Of course, one view and no sales = no money yet.

My profile is here.

Update: Hmmm... If I search for my image, I can't find it. Maybe it takes a while to get indexed into their search? Or maybe the search engine doesn't show your own images? (no, because it also doesn't show up if I log out).

Update #2 (9/5): I just got this from Dreamstime:

"Congratulations, your image has been approved and will be available online soon. Please note that it may take up to 24-48 hours for the image to show up in all areas of the website."

That explains it -- it takes a little while for images to get into search. And, lo and behold, my image shows up in search now. It has four views so far, but not sure how many are mine.

Microstock: Update and Random Comments

Some my recent activities relating to MicroStock and ideas floating around in my grey matter:

• Approx 68 hours left until my first image is reviewed.
• The search function at Dreamstime is working for me again, and the word of the day is intimidating. Yes, I knew Dreamstime has a few million photos (currently 3,668,371 from 44,500 photographers) but until I actually started searching and see the competition, I didn't really comprehend what that means. To put it narrowly, a search for snowy egret yields 235 images. Some are worse than my image, but many are better; think about it -- how can you compete with over 200 other images?
• I'm not too convinced my egret image will be accepted... See above point.
• I received $5 in my account for linking Dreamstime. That was pretty easy money.
• Yesterday I spent over 10 hours tutoring and driving between sessions... on Labor Day. How'd most people's day off get to be my busiest day in over six months? But I made way more than I will make in microstock in the forseeable future.
  
• I've started searching through my archives for stock-worthy images. I've chosen out maybe 100 images so far (about half-way done) of which maybe 20-30 will be submitted. I'm really liking Bibble Pro for the job though -- tagging can be done within the program so I can save a lot of time (hypothetically, we'll see when I start uploading). The goal is to upload a bunch to Dreamstime, then the ones that succeed will be part of the pool I draw from to go through the multi-image application at other sites.
• I just bought a second SB-20 on eBay today for $25 (inc. shipping). It's no secret I think the SB-20 is the best used flash deal out there (see my review)!
• The motivation for the SB-20 was to allow me to try out Zach's white seamless tutorials... which has really inspired me and I think I can pull it off in my garage with not much trouble. But I need that second background light!

That's it for now!

Microstock: First Image Uploaded

I just uploaded my first image (the snowy egret). Mainly I chose it because it is one of my favorites and it seems pretty safe.

Dreamstime gave me this message back:

Current pending time: 127 hours

Great. I need to wait 5 days! I guess that's not too bad. This is also a bad time since it is over Labor Day weekend.

I'll try to carve out time to upload a few more, but uploading the image raised a lot of questions:

• I tried to search for egrets on Dreamstime to see what competition there was and it came up with no results. Then again, searching for 'business' gave me no results?!?! Obviously something is wrong with my searches right now.
  
• Can I do multi-word keywords? (that'd be a no... my keywords got shortened to autumn bird egret egretta fall snowy stream thula wading walking water white)
• What are all the extra options in the rights management area? Which should I be using?
• Can I tag the images in Bibble Pro to make my life easier?

Although, editing it, it wasn't quite as safe as I originally thought. The egret was actually only a small portion of the image, so my upload was right around the 3MP limit. The shot itself was a touch soft, but I don't know how important that is in a 3MP image.

Anyway, I need to move on to other stuff right now, but I plan to do a few more shots and get them queued up to see how things go.

Microstock: The Content Problem

My biggest concern with Microstock is microstock. Most sites prefer business people, happy families, etc. And I don't usually shoot those, especially on a white background (speaking of which, Zach Arias has an awesome white seamless tutorial which I plan to study soon).

Many of my shots are similar to the above shot of my daughter. BTW, this is a candid -- she was just sitting next to our bookshelves reading a book in a very cute pose. I only got one shot before she started hiding (sadly, both my kids are starting to hide from the camera more, even though I don't often recruit them for setup shots).

To really submit a lot of shots to microstock, I need to start shooting for microstock. Honestly, that just isn't going to happen with my current schedule (typical day last week: Get up at 7 am, head to the lab to work from 8 to 2:30ish, pick up the kids at school, hang out at home for an hour until my wife gets home, tutor student from 6-8 pm, etc. Not much time for shooting stock in there!) And, when I get home, I mostly just want to sit around, not set up photo shoots.

So, my biggest concern is how many of the shots in my archives are really suitable for microstock. My thinking is not that many, but I really just need to bite the bullet and submit a few and see what happens. I have a few in mind that will probably meet the requirements but I'm a bit concerned about the subject matter -- it just isn't that suitable for stock or not very unique.

For now, I'll just work on submitting a few to Dreamstime this weekend -- just to get started. The main requirements are 3+ MP (pretty easy), max quality JPG (they say highest JPG quality (12), but that seems relatively arbitrary), low noise, etc. After looking at their reasons for refusal page, I'm not too concerned, but they might be pretty picky.


On another subject, while I like the shot above, I don't think it's microstock worthy. For one thing, I haven't exactly talked to my wife about using my kids in stock shots. It's one thing if they get exposure on my blog, but it's another thing if one of my children's faces shows up on a book about serial killers. I'm sure it will be fine to use them if their faces aren't visible, but that limits my options greatly.

Also, the original (below) needed a lot of help just to get it to the state above, plus noise is quite high.

I don't know, what do you experienced people think? Will something like that get approved? What would the major flaws be?

Microstock: Dreamstime and Referrals

At Lorraine's suggestion, I'm going to start with Dreamstime since they don't have an approval process; you can just start submitting as soon as you register (but the images still need to be approved to go up). I've heard their acceptance policies are relatively tough though.

Of course, that bring up the question about what images to submit -- which is exactly what I've been dragging my feet on. I've got another post brewing on that subject...

Signing up for Dreamstime brings up another important thing to consider when entering microstock: referrals.

You'll notice if you put your mouse over any of the Dreamstime links that it has a little bit of text past the normal URL -- in my case, that extra text is my referral id, or res895237. This means, if you clicked on any of the links (and it was your first time to the site) it'd track me as the person that refers you. Then, if you signed up, I'd get some sort of reward (in terms of Dreamstime, that is 10% of purchases and 10% of sales). Dreamstime also gives you $5 for posting a referral ad (see mine on the right).

But, I'm not bringing this up to solicit everyone to click my links -- I have a larger point.


Microstock is all about making money -- referrals are another way to bring in cash -- and honestly, if you can drive a lot of traffic to sites, referrals can easily be worth more than image sales. Referrals cut across all areas of the internet -- eBay, Amazon, clothing stores, poker sites, etc. all have referral/affiliate programs. And as a photographer, you are silly if you give up this free money.

And it really is free money, by the way. If I had just gone straight to Dreamstime for my signup instead of using a referral code, the 10% of my sales that Lorraine will make would have just stayed with Dreamstime. So, before you sign up for any new site check for a referral program. If there is, figure out who you want to give the referral to and make sure they get it. The easiest way to do this is to clear your browser cookies (by clicking on Clear Private Data or a button like that in your Tools menu), then click on the link and sign up for the site. Most links will automatically tag the referral and you don't need to worry about it from there on out.

I tend to make it a point to give referrals to friends or people who have really helped me. It helps them out and costs me nothing, which is a win-win situation.

So congrats, Lorraine. Of course, no guarantees... 10% of $0 is still $0!

Microstock: What is Success? (the Bolt/Phelps phenomenon)

Photo Credit: Flickr user Guano

So, is this topic just a ploy to get some Olympic photos on my blog?

Well, yes.

I do also have a point about microstock though.

Photo Credit: Flickr user RichardGiles

Like many endeavors, microstock has tons of participants, but very few success stories. For every Yuri Arcurs or Andres Rodriguez out there, there are tons of microstock contributors who have sold only a handful of images, and tons more who have given up after initial rejections. Of the hundreds of thousands of contributors (over 100K at Shutterstock alone), maybe 1% succeed at a rate that they can support themselves financially... And probably even less than that.

I hate to say this, but a typical photographer probably stands to make more money by getting a job at their local fast food restaurant than trying to break into microstock.


I'd love to survey microstock contributors and plot the dollar/hour distribution. And to really depress people, I could ask them to account for all the equipment they've purchased. I expect maybe 20% - 30% are actually profitable once they take equipment cost out.

This isn't an uncommon situation though. For instance, take track and field. Millions of people participate in track and field at the high school level (probably more like tens of millions or hundreds of millions). A fraction of that competes at the college level, and a tiny fraction of that fraction has success at a professional level. And on top of it all (for now) is Usain Bolt. In statistical terms, Bolt is an outlier (Freakonomics has an excellent post about Bolt's... outlieryness... and the New York Times slideshow that supports the post is well worth the look). Likewise, Phelps is an outlier -- a perfect combination of genetics, opportunity (what if he never had access to a pool?), and hard work.

Well, Yuri Arcurs is an outlier too.

And I have no reason to expect that I'll be able to break free of the tail of the distribution in microstock either.


Ultimately, that's ok. I'm going in to this knowing that, monetarily, I'd be better off spending my time working at the place my daughter calls 'Mixdonalds'.

But, I enjoy photography. I may enjoy the microstock struggle. If I don't... maybe I should work on my running and swimming.

Microstock: Some Open Questions

I feel like all I've got is questions right now about this whole microstock thing. Let me list some out along with whatever answers I have.

This is more of an organizational exercise than anything else...

• How much can I make at microstock? Probably not much according to this post. If I can make $1 per hour of effort, I'll be happy.
  
• Where should I submit images to? I'm leaning toward Istock, maybe Shutterstock, and Dreamstime -- thanks Lorraine for the comment -- I'm finding your site useful!
• What images should I submit? This is a toughy, since I suspect most of my images have too much noise since I shot them at high ISO. I'm not afraid to get rejected though.
• Do I need to take the images off my blog if they go up on a stock site? Probably.
• What model releases are needed? This will rule out many of my images.